Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles publicly claimed he doesn’t want a windfall of 160,000 bitcoins, which should go to shareholders under Japanese law. In a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ Q&A session April 3, Mark Karpeles said that he found the billion dollar windfall, which will come about as a result of Japanese bankruptcy procedures,

Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles publicly claimed he doesn’t want a windfall of 160,000 bitcoins, which should go to shareholders under Japanese law.

In a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ Q&A session April 3, Mark Karpeles said that he found the billion dollar windfall, which will come about as a result of Japanese bankruptcy procedures, to be “distasteful”.

Karpeles confirmed that the Mt. Gox shareholders were in line to receive 160,000 BTC ($1.127 billion USD) after the company reimbursed the affected users their bitcoin holdings in Japanese yen, not bitcoin itself.

“The way bankruptcy law works [in Japan] is that if there are any assets remaining after the creditors have been paid in full, then those assets are distributed to shareholders as part of the liquidation,” Karpeles stated.

“I don’t want this. I don’t want this billion dollars. From day one I never expected to receive anything from this bankruptcy. The fact that today this is a possibility is an aberration and I believe it is my responsibility to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

Karpeles have presided over the process of returning funds to Mt. Gox’s long-suffering creditors since he was granted bail in 2016. The process has taken over four years and resulted in considerable frustration on the part of those who lost money.

The Mt. Gox estate saw a widespread criticism after it was revealed that around $400 million in cryptocurrencies had been sold in the past months by the exchange’s bankruptcy trustee, Nobuaki Kobayashi.

Some investors even alleged that the large sell-off had influenced the decline in bitcoin prices since December last year.